When it comes to worker safety, factory automation is a winner.
That flies in the face of the harsh criticism automation in manufacturing has seen in the press and popular opinion in recent years. It’s not without cause, either – there are far too many horror stories of jobs lost when plants were automated. This has been happening for decades now. There’s also been plenty of “ink spilled” about the steady decline in manufacturing employment for the past 40 years. And of course, automation can lead to consolidation of operations, meaning plant closures and their brutal impacts to local economies.
Those things are easy to see.
Here’s what’s not easy to see: your neighbor who would have had a debilitating injury, but is instead healthy today thanks to automation that eliminated repetitive tasks. Or your relative whose crippling back pain and subsequent surgeries never happened thanks to a robot that now does the heavy lifting. Or the whole, undamaged hand your coworker actually still has, rather than a maimed one he would have had but didn’t, because a machine long ago took over the duties at his workplace that would have put him into danger.
The term “automation” covers a lot of ground. A simple conveyor belt is automation, because it takes a manual job – people carrying things by hand – and has a machine do it. An industrial robot with a carbon-fiber-placing effector head also replaces a manual job, but with far more complexity and cost.
Oftentimes it’s the money equation that drives automation of given jobs; the reality is that a machine can simply do the work more economically than a person can. This is, after all, what drove the original move to automation and launched the industrial revolution over 100 years ago. The resulting increase in manufacturing throughputs, productivity gains, and lower costs for finished goods have all been lauded thousands of times over.
But it’s where automation takes over tasks that can – and have – hurt people that it doesn’t get nearly enough credit. Worker on-the-job injuries have been falling for years. While there are a number of different reasons for this, it’s impossible to deny that automation has played a big part in these improvements to worker safety.
There are a few basic areas where automation has improved or eliminated dangerous work. One is in lifting and moving heavy or unwieldy objects. Back injuries are one of the most common ones in manufacturing work, and these kinds of activities are a key contributor. Automated solutions include robotic pick-and-place systems, automated palletizers, vacuum hoist systems, and the like. Where years ago people relied on brute force to move big things around, today it’s unusual to have workers lifting more than 50 pounds, and for repetitive lifting even that much is becoming progressively rarer.
Speaking of repetitive things, any of that kind of motion, regardless of what weight is being moved, is another area where automation reduces a previously common source of injuries. Carpal tunnel syndrome is well-known as an office malady, but it was also prevalent in manufacturing, as were other cumulative trauma injuries. Some of the earliest forms of automation addressed this kind of work, focused at first on production efficiency gains. So everything from bagging to boxing to loading to welding, and so on, was automated by most manufacturers decades ago. As our understanding of repetitive motion injuries improved, worker safety drove further automation and mechanical assist installations.
A final area where automation improves worker safety is in unsafe environments. Automated equipment is used in spaces where chemicals and particulates, temperature extremes, or other physical hazards make jobs too dangerous for humans to perform safely. Advanced steel mill cranes are a good example. Cranes have been used in mills for decades to address the lifting of enormous weights, but there are now programmable, fully automated cranes that not only lift, but move manufactured materials in and out of high-temperature areas and through painting, chroming, or galvanizing operations where chemical exposure is a danger.
Interestingly, automation equipment itself has gotten safer over the years. Early machines solved a number of safety problems as detailed above, but then they themselves created new hazards, with exposed mechanical operations or electrical circuits, or by simply being large machines themselves that moved autonomously. Mechanical guards, electronic interlocks and sensors, light curtains and even advanced vision systems have all been used to address these automation-related safety risks.
When good people are put out of work because machines take their place, it’s completely understandable that bad publicity follows. Nobody likes high unemployment rates or idled factories, though these have been a reality of ever-increasing industrial automation for many years. At the same time, though, it’s important we acknowledge the many benefits that manufacturing automation has brought us. Chief among those benefits is worker safety.
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